Last weekend, despite rain, mud, and general overcast blusteriness,  we set out to cut down our Christmas tree. The trip was characterized by much vacillating amongst tree varieties (we went for ever-popular-in-Europe, native-to-the-Caucasus Nordmann fir), three re-ripping outs of a knitting project in the car, much fearful note-taking on the differences between the rather game local kids and the damp, sad, pretty pathetic  city kids who don’t get out in nature much), punctuated by a silly lost baby mocassin (which, in typical superhero fashion, papa saved at the 11th hour). It was great fun — and hopefully will become a tradition with years to come.

What I mean is this: I love this so much, this being someone’s mother, and being with my baby all day long. Being consumed by my baby, most days. But it’s not something I know how to talk about well, which makes conversation hard, and blogging, too. Where do I start?  How to convey what is it that I do all day?  Where I’m from, being a “stay-at-home mom” (that very wording makes it sounds like opting out of society!) is a political act, or something close akin to it. I assume that others assume a great deal about me and my choices.  How to engage other people in my choices, my cares, my life, when it’s so often easier to feel inadequate and hope they won’t ask “what I’ve been up to recently”? Every day with my daughter is a day that I become steadier, more grounded, which is,  I think, a great feat, a glorious, quiet, peaceful feat. But it’s not something that lends itself to lots of the “hey, guess what [happened, what I read, where I went, what I did, etc.]!” interactions I’ve long relied on (in person, and on the internet) to stay connected to the people I love.  I’m just going to have to try a few things, and see how it goes. Starting with today.

How to tell you about today? Today was bleak and rainy, and we didn’t go out at all! I washed many a woolen item by hand, and did loads of laundry in the new-to-us (the dryer was broken up until now) washroom in our building’s basement, which is more exciting than one might think, as the building is 125 years old, and the basement serves as a graveyard for ovens and stoves and curious boilerplates from throughout its history. It’s great fun to lurk about down there. I’m working on several knitting projects (one of which I’ll share soon, though some are top secret), and I’ve been glad for the daily advent dosage from Father Hopko’s Winter Pascha. I 86ed half of my own wardrobe, and sorted through all the things D has outgrown. I had bought loads of cranberries at the farm market last Saturday, and set about using them to make favorite pies to freeze, for the Nativity (a “winter fruit pie” with pears, apples, dried figs, cranberries, and walnuts from Rustic Fruit Desserts), along with a roast chicken and then some sweet potato hash for our dinner. But I stopped constantly to marvel at my little baby, who really isn’t so little, and won’t ever be little again, and  who is busy engineering complex means of locomotion until she can walk all on her own. She spends the days testing to see what in our home is stationary and what is not,  pushing chairs and boxes and footstools about, tilting them every which way, using them to walk the length of each room and then turns them around and comes back the other way. She gets into the box of children’s books we have, turns the page of every one, and then comes and finds me. She’s never far away, and I’m never far from her, but it’s taking getting used to, honestly, that she’s separate at all.

(Technical difficulties mean no photos today, but they’re forthcoming)

Having a baby – and especially a baby girl – really gets you thinking about gender, and nothing does so more than baby clothing and personal effects. Everything for babies is smothered in words and baby animals anyways, but is also festooned and centrally implicated in a tremendous anxiety about gender-broadcasting. We tried to go the gender neutral route ( we were greatly buoyed by not finding out D’s gender ahead of time), and have been sort of alarmed at how little is available (nothing will make you learn to sew so fast as having a baby and hating Target. And praise the Lord for thrift stores). I’m not distressed if stranger botch her gender, or have to ask — but what I am slightly distressed by is how, if wearing bright blue floral pants, or a grey gown with flowers on it, D is assumed to be a boy because those aren’t “girl colors” (for the record, her features are actually fairly feminine). Not that flowers on boys is anathema, but I’m kind of alarmed that nothing means female except for pink. Why should color be so, so preeminent — and why pink?

Thinking about this recently,  I dug up an old email conversation with my college roommates about an 2008 article from the Guardian; Eleanor Bailey on “The Tyranny of Pink.” We really, really had at it then, and the article’s thought-provoking still. It is continually thought-provoking. Bailey suggests the whole pink thing is rather sinister — linking it to consumerism, the Kagoy (“kids are getting older younger”) phenomenon, over-sexualization, segregation, the paradox of choice, and, predictably these days, neurobiology. Maybe it’s also a force of American cultural imperialism?

Call me over-analytical (I am.), but I’m rarely the most feminist person in a room , and yet it’s a little bit enraging when you read into those ubiquitous cutsey gendered big-box-store clothing. Writes Bailey, “While naff boys’ clothes suggest that your lad is some hybrid of Einstein and Rambo – with words such as “genius”, “roar” and “tank” splashed across chests – the aspirational look for girls is more alarming. Along with “princess” and “born to party”, the legends on young girls’ T-shirts include “porn star”.

Also, check out the Pink and Blue Project of photographer JeongMee Yoon, from which the above photograph was taken. D will never, ever have so many things, let alone pink ones!!

The Orthodox Church began Lent in earnest on Sunday evening with a powerfully right-putting service called Forgiveness Vespers, at which one approaches every other person in the parish (whether your own husband or someone you’ve never even seen before), and they ask forgiveness of one another: “Forgive me, a sinner.” I was absent from the service, home with The Baby (who is roughly twenty days too young for church), but I’d like to share a choice reflection on it, one that gets to the bottom of how we can (and should) ask forgiveness of someone we’ve never talked to, and why (as the Brothers Karamazov posits) we are guilty “for all and before all”:

“It is true that open enmity, personal hatred, real animosity may be absent from our life, though if we experience them, it may be easier for us to repent, for these feelings openly contradict Divine commandments. But the Church reveals to us that there are much subtler ways of offending Divine Love. These are indifference, selfishness, lack of interest in other people, of any real concern for them – in short, that wall which we usually erect around ourselves, thinking that by being “polite” and “friendly” we fulfill God’s commandments. The rite of forgiveness is so important precisely because it makes us realize – be it only for one minute – that our entire relationship to other men is wrong, makes us experience that encounter of one child of God with another, of one person created by God with another, makes us feel that mutual “recognition” which is so terribly lacking in our cold and dehumanized world.”

Can one, then, ask to be forgiven over the internets? Forgive me, a sinner.

THIRTY WEEKS of healthy, fairly uneventful gestation (yes, blog world, we’re expecting a baby — and soon!)

My astoundingly generous parents

Time and space in the kitchen for near-constant experimentation

& the same inexplicably good simple soup that never gets old for when I’m tired of the complicated experimentation

Skype and friends across the world to call, and they will come back someday!

A New York Review of Books subscription

Beautiful baby things to be looking out for, and collecting, like so and so and so and so (I’m working hard on making things!)

“Trips” back to our college campus are always ebulliently good, even if they happen every two weeks or so.

Forgive me if I’m being Panglossian, but a domino-effect stomach flu that wiped us out this weekend turned great when we spend the time plowing through half of the final third of the Lord of the Rings (it’s my first time! and we’ve gotten so far!)

A slightly-crazy-sounding “Amish Healthy Foods” store just opened a block away. That, combined with the Polish Deli/Liquor Store two blocks south, may just be filling in our food desert

Our recent acquisition of a Volvo, which, although we feel like sell-outs, has been a great great help (and a particular joy to John)

Jonathan Franzen’s mocking of Volvo owners in Freedom

Great midwives

Snow, today!! Sustained, if slight.

The chance for a looong trip home to DC — coming soon!

When, in college, I studied abroad in Russia, I lived for the majority of the time in Saint Petersburg with an aging single woman, the retired editor at a literary press, named Olga Alexandrovna, in a Khrushchev-era apartment filled to the brim with dusty hardcovers and little owl-themed tchotchkes, not far from the Gulf of Finland.  I loved that apartment, and I loved Olga Alexandrovna. One weekend, in early November, she announced we’d be going to her family’s dacha — further north on the Gulf of Finland, reachable by train. I’d heard little about her family, and as I understand it, there were siblings with children who lived permanently at the dacha, but still she retained her own special corners of the home (think stacks of books, muddy boots, shelves of teacups), over which she alone was proprietor.

It was a moist, cloudy day — just like every day I spent in Petersburg — but it wasn’t yet freezing, and we set off early in the morning. It was a rare thing to be out in the world with Olga Alexandrovna, as our every interaction happened at home, in that apartment, due in part to her escalating heart problems — save for sundry excursions to graveyards (to visit her mother’s grave, and the graveyard church where Aleksandr Blok’s funeral was held, and later, her father’s grave, and Aleksandr Blok’s grave near to his, and Saint Ksenia’s, which was across the street, and the destination of many an autumnal walk for me). Looking back, I think that this was the only time we left the apartment together and didn’t go to a cemetery. I held her hand carefully on the Metro, guiding her through the perekhods, and we reached the station for the small regional train, called an electrichka. Together, we haggled at the market for cucumbers and tomatoes, and then boarded a train north, through the country north of Petersburg.  We walked in the rain from the station to her dacha, the outside of which I hardly recollect, it being overshadowed by the enchanted disrepair of its neighbor to the left, covered by rambling vines and, in the yard, an abandoned green Lada, on top of which there was a goat. Inside I met the relatives, and we prepared a proper Russian tea, with tea and dry cookies, open-faced sandwiches, tomato cucumber salad, and cognac, though I was greatly chided for the impropriety of my way of slicing the cucumbers, tomatoes, and garlic for our salad (the appropriate Russian way has since been ingrained in me).

I think somehow, the interactions with her family quickly made Olga Alexandrovna a bit stir crazy. She also simply loved being in nature. But either way, we spent the rest of day walking on paths around the shore of the Gulf of Finland, not returning to the home. We stood be the shore and watched the sun, which half-sets  early in Petersburg in November. We watched small woodland creatures, and I held her hand and we slowly walked, and she’d chide me to button up my coat further, and we’d keep walking once that was fixed to her satisfaction. And we came to a crossing of two paths in the midst of tall, tall trees, and she stopped. And she looked up and the yelled, loudly, “SPASIBO!!!!!” which means: thank you.  Olga Alexandrovna was always rather dismissive of my religious inclinations (“you’ll grow out of them.”), but here she smiled broadly and told me that there wasn’t any way there could be so much beauty, so much splendor to a day outside in the forest, a good day like ours, good in the world, without Someone, particularly, to thank for it. Gratitude must always have a recipient, and so, she explained, on occasion, she had to yell her thanks to the sky. And she let out another loud “THANK YOU!” and I yelled “thank you,” too, with her.

And we walked back, and nearly fell asleep on the train, and at the market on the edge of the city, we bought some enormous mushrooms wrapped in newspaper, that an older woman, slightly more limber than Olga Alexandrovna, had scavenged from the forest and was hawking on the curbside. I was taught just how to clean and prepare them, which I did while Olga Alexandrovna read to me, and we sat down to a feast of mushrooms.

It occurs to me now that I shouldn’t have been so dismayed, later in the month, to find myself alone in a coffeeshop on Thanksgiving day, revising drafts of poetry translations with a cup of tea and a slice of mushroom pie, while my family bustled about for a feast at home in Washington. Because by then,  I’d already observed Thanksgiving, with Olga Alexandrovna.

For the most part, this is what Chicago has been like so far, but with a bit more bumpers creeping towards bumpers:

We’re looking forward to moving into our new neighborhood and getting settled! And, to fast approaching weddings and births amongst our friends here!!

Another reason our leaving DC felt really really sad.

A few weekends back, we went with my parents and my freshly-returned brother out to my dad’s canoe club on the Potomac. “Out” is just about 10 minutes from the city. The club was celebrating both its 125th birthday and the renovation of its club house. There is a rope ferry across the river to Sycamore Island, where there was a potluck, campy bandannas and little flags, documentary photographs spanning the clubs 125 year history (scruffy German men poking fires in 1890, elaborate bathing costumes from 1920, canoe expeditions in the 40s, etc), a borrowed band, and a contradance. Somehow all the pictures of people ended up on my mom’s camera; there’s not so much documentation for the fact that we were there with seventy five other people and with a big clubhouse.

And for good measure, the Derby pie and strawberry galette that I made the weekend prior: